Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America considers American minority literatures from the perspective of print culture. Putting in dialogue European and American scholars and spanning the slavery era through the early 21st century, they draw on approaches from library history, literary history and textual studies.

This study examines several unexplored aspects of Robert Frost’s poetry—proverbs, riddles, and names—and shows how they contribute to the reader's experience. Timothy D. O'Brien argues that while they often shape Frost’s poems as sites of inviting wisdom and play, these features also open up the poems to radical doubt about identity, authorship, and reality. This book offers the most extensive research to date of the relationship between Frost’s poetry and the visual art that often accompanied it and sheds new light on the work of one of the twentieth century’s most highly regarded poets.    

J.R.R. Tolkien delved into the Middle Ages to create a critique of the modern world in his fantasy, yet did so in a form of modernist literature with postmodern implications and huge commercial success. These essays examine that paradox and its significance in understanding the intersection between traditionalist and counter-culture criticisms of the modern. The approach helps to explain the popularity of his works, the way in which they continue to be brought into dialogue with twenty-first century issues, and their contested literary significance in the academy.

This new volume in the "Author Chronology "series illuminates the writing of Edith Wharton by detailing her experiences and placing her in her social context. Edith Wharton was a prolific as well as a many-sided writer, who created not only novels, novellas, short stories, and poems, but also a notable series of travel writings, and did translations, pieces for the theatre, and essays on other writers and their works, as well as on the creation and criticism of fiction.This account of Wharton's personal and professional life provides an invaluable insight into an important American woman writer of the twentieth century.

Voices from the Asylum is a fascinating investigation of the lives of four women incarcerated in French psychiatric hospitals in the second half of the nineteenth century. The renowned sculptor (and mistress of Rodin) Camille Claudel, the musician Hersilie Rouy, the feminist activist Marie Esquiron, and the self-proclaimed mystic and eccentric Pauline Lair Lamotte, all left first-hand accounts of their experiences. These rare and unsettling documents provide the foundation for a unique insight into the experience of psychiatric breakdown and treatment from the patient's viewpoint.
By linking the question of gender to the process of medical diagnosis made by contemporary clinicians such as Sigmund Freud, this book argues that psychiatric medicine functioned as an integral part of an essentially misogynistic and oppressive society. Wilson suggests that "delusional" utterances can be read as meaningful when read as metaphorical expressions of real suffering, and as strategies to ensure the survival of a self under threat. These narratives therefore constituted an act of resistance on the part of the women who wrote them, and they prefigure the feminist revisionist histories of psychiatry that appeared later in the twentieth century.
Straddling the disciplines of literature and social history, and based on extensive archival research, this book makes an important contribution to the feminist project of writing women back into literary history. It brings to light a remarkable but hitherto unrecognised literary tradition in the prehistory of psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir.

Part ode, part academic treatise, this book traces the transformation of Cairo's historic downtown from its spectacular beginning as a French inspired Belle Epoque marvel to a site of contest and, more recently, to its role as a neo-bohemian public sphere. Using the work of several Egyptian novelists, this study explores the significance of this space to ideas of modernity, class consciousness, and the anti-colonial struggle. Drawing on urban studies scholarship, Arabic literary criticism, and cultural theory, this wide-ranging work argues that a re-examination of the historic city center in the face of globalization and the ongoing fragmentation of urban space is essential to understanding what it means to be Egyptian today.

Pearl Buck made important contributions as a humanitarian and an advocate of racial equality and women's rights. She did much to change American attitudes toward persons with mental retardation and toward mixed-race children. She was a major force in shaping American views of Asia, particularly China, during the 1930s and 1940s. Until 1993, she was first American woman to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The 13 essays in this book, the first such collection on Buck to be published in the United States, view her from historical, humanitarian, and literary perspectives.

What do fictional representations of older women add to our understanding of a group of individuals often marginalized in our youth-oriented society? Starting from an overview of 19th-century women's fiction, this book explores this and other questions through close readings of the work of major 20th-century women novelists, considered in relation to these non-fictional perceptions.

The Theatre of Nation is a study of the development of the theatre movement and its relationship to political change in Ireland during the pre-revolutionary period. Ben Levitas traces the connections between Irish drama and Irish politics, and concludes that Ireland's theatre had a pivotal role to play in the controversies of its time and in the coming revolution.

This book fills a gap in both literary and feminist scholarship by offering the first major study of femme fatales in hardboiled crime fiction. Maysaa Jaber shows that the criminal literary figures in the genre open up powerful spaces for imagining female agency in direct opposition to the constraining forces of patriarchy and misogyny.

One of America's greatest writers, William Faulkner wrote fiction that combined spellbinding Southern storytelling with modernist formal experimentation to shape an enduring body of work. In his fictional Yoknapatawpha County--based on the region around his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi--he created an entire world peopled with unforgettable characters linked into an intricate historical and social web. An introduction to the Nobel-Prize-winning author's life and work, this book devotes opening chapters to his biography and literary heritage and subsequent chapters to each of his major works. The analytical chapters start with his most accessible book, The Unvanquished, a Civil-War-era account of a boy's coming of age. The following chapters orient readers to elements of plot, character, and theme in Faulkner's masterpieces: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Also analyzed and discussed are some of Faulkner's most often anthologized short stories, including "A Rose For Emily" and "Barn Burning," and the longer stories "The Bear," "Spotted Horses," and "The Old Man" that were incorporated in the novels Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Clear, insightful analyses of the elements of Faulkner's fiction are supplemented with alternative readings from a variety of critical approaches including gender, rhetorical, performance, and cultural studies perspectives.

• The Unvanquished
• The Sound and the Fury
• As I Lay Dying
• Light in August
• Absalom, Absalom!
• Selected short stories

Theatre has always been a site for selling outrage and sensation, a place where public reputations are made and destroyed in spectacular ways. This is the first book to investigate the construction and production of celebrity in the British theatre. These exciting essays explore aspects of fame, notoriety and transgression in a wide range of performers and playwrights including David Garrick, Oscar Wilde, Ellen Terry, Laurence Olivier and Sarah Kane. This pioneering volume examines the ingenious ways in which these stars have negotiated their own fame. The essays also analyze the complex relationships between discourses of celebrity and questions of gender, spectatorship and the operation of cultural markets.

More than a hundred years ago, Freud made a new mythology by revising an old one: Oedipus, in Sophocles' tragedy the legendary perpetrator of shocking crimes, was an Everyman whose story of incest and parricide represented the fulfillment of universal and long forgotten childhood wishes. The Oedipus complex--child, mother, father--suited the nuclear families of the mid-twentieth century. But a century after the arrival of the psychoanalytic Oedipus, it might seem that modern lives are very much changed. Typical family formations and norms of sexual attachment are changing, while the conditions of sexual difference, both biologically and socially, have undergone far-reaching modifications. Today, it is possible to choose and live subjective stories that the first psychoanalytic patients could only dream of. Different troubles and enjoyments are speakable and unspeakable; different selves are rejected, discovered, or sought. Many kinds of hitherto unrepresented or unrepresentable identity have entered into the ordinary surrounding stories through which children and adults find their bearings in the world, while others have become obsolete. Biographical narratives that would previously have seemed unthinkable or incredible--"a likely story!"--have acquired the straightforward plausibility of a likely story.
This book takes two Freudian routes to think about some of the present entanglements of identity. First, it follows Freud in returning to Greek tragedies--Oedipus and others--which may now appear strikingly different in the light of today's issues of family and sexuality. And second, it re-examines Freud's own theories from these newer perspectives, drawing out different strands ofhis stories of how children develop and how people change (or don't). Both kinds of mythology, the classical and the theoretical, may now, in their difference, illuminate some of the forming stories of our contemporary world of serial families, multiple sexualities, and new reproductive technologies.

Adorno and Modern Theatre explores the drama of Edward Bond, David Rudkin, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane in the context of the work of leading philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). The book engages with key principles of Adorno's aesthetic theory and cultural critique and examines their influence on a generation of seminal post-war dramatists.

This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR and the literariness of its literature. The many fictional suicides in the literature of the German Democratic Republic have been greatly misunderstood. The common assumption is that authoritarian oppression in East Germany led to an anomalous abundance of real suicides, so that fictional suicides in GDR literature constitute a simple, realistic reflection of East German society. Robert Blankenship challenges this assumption by providing both a history of suicide in GDR literature and close readings of individual texts, revealing that suicides in GDR literature, rather than simply reflecting historical suicides, contain rich literary attributes such as intertextuality, haunting, epistolarity, and unorthodox narrative strategies. Such literariness offered subversive potential beyond suggesting that real people killed themselves in a communist country. This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR. Blankenship's underlying claim is that GDR literature ought to be read as literature, with literary methodology, not despite the country's politically and rhetorically charged nature,but precisely because of it. Suicide in East German Literature will be of interest to scholars of GDR literature, humanities-oriented scholars of suicide, and those who are interested in the complex relationship between literature and history. Robert Blankenship is Assistant Professor of German at California State University, Long Beach.

""Trespassing Boundaries is an excellent collection of insightful and significant essays. Edited by the distinguished scholar-critics Kathryn N. Benzel and Ruth Hoberman--who themselves have contributed invaluable essays--this splendid volume will point the way to a reconsideration of Woolf's work in the genre of short fiction."--Daniel R. Schwarz, Professor of English and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Cornell University
""Trespassing Boundaries is a very welcome addition to Virginia Woolf studies and to narrative theory. The ten essays offer rich explorations from diverse viewpoints of Woolf's wonderful and provocative experiments in short fiction. Woolf scholars and narrative theorists will be consulting these essays for many years to come."--James Phelan, author of "Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration and editor of "Narrative

A major study of the work of one of Britain's best-known dramatists Peter Barnes was one of the UK's most significant, prolific and enduring playwrights. This book offers a major critical appraisal of the canon of Barnes' work, including a detailed study of his best-known plays, The Ruling Class, Bewitched, Laughter!, Red Noses, and Dreaming, as well as a selection of his television and radio plays which illuminate his thematic concerns, and offer key insights into his dramatic methods. Through this examination, Brian Woolland shows that many of Barnes' plays have remarkable contemporary relevance, and are formally far more innovative than has hitherto been recognised. Woolland analyses the ways in which Barnes uses and subverts theatrical traditions, and relates his work to relevant critical contexts: theatrical, critical and socio-political. Deservedly, Barnes' use of comedy is given special attention. It is a sad truth that Barnes' great talents have not always been acknowledged by the theatrical establishment. In this exciting study, Barnes finally gets the recognition he deserves, as one of the most original, daring and exuberant dramatists of his generation.

This volume features new essays by eminent and emerging Woolf scholars from around the world, focusing on Virginia Woolf's and Bloomsbury's politics. Themes include war, freedom of the press, economics and cultural production, the Hogarth Press, the global circulation of ideas, and transformations to the public sphere.

This study examines James Herriot's five major books as carefully crafted volumes of autobiography based on the building block of the short story. In each of these works Herriot explores the fundamental choice of values underlying a happy and successful life. In his vision the bonds of affection and mutual dependence between all creatures, human and animal, form an enduring theme that lies at the heart of the choices he makes in his personal and professional life. This study will help the reader to understand the relationship between Herriot's stories and each book as a whole and to appreciate Herriot's work in the context of twentieth-century anxieties about identity and meaning.

Following a biographical chapter that describes the relationship between Herriot's life and literary work, Rossi discusses the genre of autobiography, the relationship between truth and fiction in modern autobiography, and Herriot's use of the genre. A separate chapter is then devoted to each of Herriot's works in turn: "All Creatures Great and Small," "All Things Bright and Beautiful," "All Things Wise and Wonderful," "The Lord God Made Them All," and DEGREES"Every Living Thing." The discussion of each work includes sections on plot development and narrative structure, character development, thematic issues, and alternative critical approaches that may be fruitfully applied to the book. Helpful appendices contain identifications of minor characters in the works. A complete bibliography of all of James Herriot's works, critical sources, and a listing of reviews of all of his works completes the volume. Because of the popularity of Herriot's work among adults and young adults this companion will be a key purchase for school and public libraries.

The twelve essays in this book explore in depth for the first time the publishing and reading practices which were formed and changed by the First World War. Ranging from an exploration of British and Australian trench journals and the reading practices of Indian soldiers to the impact of war on the literary figures of the home front in Britain, these essays provide crucial new historical information about the production, circulation and reception of reading matter during a period of international crisis.

At first glance, Samuel Beckett's writing - where scenes of violence and cruelty often provide the occasion for an unremittingly bleak comedy - would seem to offer the reader few examples of "ethical" conduct. However, following the recent "ethical turn" in critical theory, there has been growing interest in the "ethicality" of Becketta??s work. Following Alain Badiou's highly influential claim for Beckett as essentially an ethical thinker, it is time to ask: What is the relation between Beckett's work and the ethical? Is Beckett's work profoundly ethical in its implications, as both humanist and deconstructionist readings have insisted in their different ways? Or does Beckett's work in some way call into question the entire notion of the ethical? This provocative collection of essays seeks to map out this emerging debate in Beckett criticism. It will be a landmark contribution to an exciting new field, not only in Beckett Studies, but in literary studies and critical theory more broadly.

In the rapidly growing field of African literature in French, writing by women has largely been ignored. This book, the first comprehensive study of women's writing in francophone sub-Saharan Africa, redressess the critical imbalance and celebrates the originality of this fascinating new literature.
Considering questions of genre and ideology, the author highlights the tension between the individualistic act of writing and the collective tradition of African society - a tension which emerges as the key to each of the texts discussed. Focusing on four major authors - Mariama Bâ, Aminata Sow Fall, Werewere Liking and Calixthe Beyala, each with an international reputation - the book uses a feminist approach to consider the duality of the African woman, who is often torn between modernity and tradition. This duality, the author suggests, is reconfigured through fictional writings which provide a space for alternative female subjectivities to emerge.

"The Radical Spaces of Poetry" introduces a diverse range of experimental writing from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It examines the political, social and cultural implications of some of the most exciting and dynamic work of recent years, and the ways it produces discursive spaces for radical social and political perspectives.

Using a cognitive approach to literature, Self-Consciousness in Modern British Fiction uncovers representations of self-consciousness in selected modern British novels, exposing it as complicating character development. This innovative study offers new readings of works by Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and Lessing to demonstrate the emergence of a self who feels split from the world. Readings of individual novels are informed by early twentieth century British psychology and philosophy, and by contemporary scholarship in embodied cognition and narrative identity. The models of self-consciousness rendered visible by this analysis improve our understanding of modernist technical experiment with stream-of-consciousness and free indirect discourse.